# Chapter 2 – Training Alone
The mornings were quiet in our village.
Wind through the trees. Metal clinking softly in the workshop. The smell of oil and old wood.
That was how every day started now.
Ren had stopped giving instructions a week after my birthday. He just left the old metal bowl on the table before heading to his bench a sign I'd learned to read without asking. You know enough. Find the rest yourself.
So I did.
Each launch began the same way. Launcher low. Grip steady. Pull. Eclipse Drago would cut across the bowl in a line I could almost see before I'd even released the cord, and then I'd watch to see if the line held.
Sometimes it did. More often it didn't.
I kept a notebook. Angle too steep. Pull speed inconsistent. Driver making contact before the spin had fully settled. I filled pages with small corrections and crossed out the ones that didn't help, and when the pencil started to hurt my hand I switched to sitting with Drago in my palm and just looking at him.
The problem wasn't the notes.
The launches were getting cleaner. The lines were getting steadier. By any measure I should have been improving.
But it still felt like operating a machine.
Precise. Empty. Wrong.
I tried different grips. Different stances. I went back through everything Ren had shown me and looked for what I was missing. Nothing changed. Drago moved correctly and felt like nothing at all, and I couldn't explain to anyone not even myself why that bothered me as much as it did.
That night I sat on my bed with him resting in my palm.
"You were supposed to be more than this," I said quietly.
The metal was cold.
My reflection looked back at me from the red core small, tired, six years old in a body that felt borrowed.
"Or maybe I'm the one who's not ready."
No answer. Of course not.
I set him on the windowsill and went to sleep.
---
The next day the sky came in gray and heavy, rain tapping against the workshop windows before I'd even finished breakfast. Ren had gone into town for supplies. The workshop was mine.
I told myself today would be different.
"Three. Two. One. Let it rip."
Strong launch. Clean entry. Drago hit the bowl hard and found the rim and then the driver caught too early, the line broke, and the spin collapsed inside four seconds.
I reset. Tried again.
Worse.
Again.
Worse.
"Come on," I said, pulling harder than I should have.
Drago jumped the rim entirely and clattered across the floor.
I stood there looking at him. The edges had new scratches small ones, catching the gray light from the window. My chest felt tight in a way I couldn't name.
I walked over and picked him up.
"It's not your fault," I muttered.
But I wasn't sure I meant it. And I wasn't sure which one of us I was talking to.
I sat down on the floor beside the bowl with my back against the table leg. The rain outside grew louder. I turned Drago over in my hands, running my thumb along the gold edge.
"I miss them."
The words came out before I could stop them. Quiet, barely above a breath but out, which meant real, which meant I couldn't take them back.
My real parents. The apartment. The dishes I hadn't washed.
Aya and Ren were kind. I knew that. I wasn't confused about that. But kind wasn't the same as known, and sometimes in the quiet of the workshop I felt the distance between those two things like something physical.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye.
Stopped. Breathed.
*You know this,* I told myself. *You've always known this would be part of it.*
It didn't help as much as I wanted it to.
I set Drago on the table and stared at him until the tightness in my chest loosened enough to breathe normally. The rain kept going. The workshop stayed quiet.
And then something shifted.
Not the air. Not the light. Nothing I could point to.
Just a feeling like the room had paused around that one small Bey sitting still on the table, like something in the silence had turned toward me instead of away.
The red of the core looked deeper than usual.
I stayed very still.
Then the feeling passed, and the rain was just rain again, and I exhaled slowly and didn't try to explain it even to myself.
---
Morning came clear.
I didn't take out the notebook. I didn't review my notes from the day before or plan the angle or think about the driver timing.
I just picked Drago up, loaded the launcher, and stood in front of the bowl.
"Three. Two. One."
The ripcord snapped clean.
Drago flew forward and found the rim like he'd always known where it was smooth, low, precise and the driver touched down with a sound like a whisper and held.
The spin was perfect.
I knew it immediately. Not from the notebook, not from measuring the angle or checking the line. I just knew, the way you know when something fits exactly the way it was supposed to.
And then the world went dark.
Not slowly. Not like falling asleep. One moment I was standing in the workshop the next, I wasn't standing anywhere I recognized.
The space around me was vast and black, the kind of dark that has depth to it, that goes on further than you can think about without feeling small. But there was light too, moving in long threads through the air deep red and gold, curling like embers caught in wind, tracing patterns that almost looked like wings.
Heat pressed against my skin. Not burning. Just alive.
Something rose from the center of it.
Massive. Patient. The shape of it unfolded slowly, like it had been waiting a long time and wasn't in any hurry now that I'd finally arrived. Wings that could have covered the workshop ten times over. A neck that curved with the particular weight of something ancient. Eyes that burned not with anger, not with hunger, but with a steadiness that made my breath catch.
A dragon.
Gold and crimson, smoke curling from its jaws, its scales catching light that had no source.
Eclipse Drago.
It looked down at me for a long moment without speaking.
I looked back.
I'd watched the anime in my old world a hundred times. I knew what Bey avatars were supposed to look like fire and motion and dramatic light. But this was nothing like that. This was quieter. Heavier. Like standing next to something that had existed long before I'd built it and would exist long after.
"You're real," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected.
The dragon's head tilted slightly not a nod, just an acknowledgment. When it spoke, the voice didn't echo the way sounds do in large spaces. It went the other direction, inward, resonating somewhere behind my ribs.
"I've been here since the first launch," it said. "You just weren't listening."
I thought about the past week. The notebook. The crossed-out corrections. The launches that were technically clean and felt completely hollow.
"I thought I was doing it right," I said.
"You were." The smoke shifted around its jaws. "That was the problem."
I frowned. "That doesn't make sense."
"You were launching correctly," it said. "Angle, grip, pull speed all correct. But correct isn't the same as real." The great eyes held mine. "You were trying to build a perfect machine. I'm not a machine."
The heat around me shifted, pressing in closer not threatening, but present. Like it wanted to make sure I understood.
"Then what are you?" I asked.
The dragon was quiet for a moment.
"What you are," it said finally. "When you stop being careful."
I stood with that for a second.
In my old life I'd been careful about everything. Work. Schedules. The same road home every night. Careful right up until the moment a car had come out of nowhere and careful had stopped mattering entirely.
And here six years old in a repair shop, carrying memories of a life nobody in this world knew about I'd been careful again. Controlled. Precise. Treating every launch like a problem to solve instead of something to mean.
"I don't know how to stop being careful," I said. Honest, maybe more honest than I'd been with anyone since I'd woken up in this world.
The dragon lowered its head until its eyes were level with mine. Up close, the heat was intense not painful, but impossible to ignore, like standing next to something that ran on a different kind of energy than everything else in the world.
"You already know," it said. "You did it just now, on that last launch. You stopped thinking and you pulled."
I remembered. The moment before the world had gone dark no notebook, no plan. Just the launcher in my hand and Drago at the end of it.
"And?" I said.
"And you found me."
The gold-red light around us brightened. The wings shifted, scattering a cascade of sparks that drifted down through the dark like slow fire.
"I don't need you to be perfect," it said. "I need you to be present. There's a difference." A pause, and when it spoke again the voice was quieter. "You've been carrying a lot of weight alone. That's why the launches felt empty. You were somewhere else every time you pulled."
My throat tightened unexpectedly.
I didn't answer.
The dragon didn't push.
It just waited, the way large things wait without impatience, without filling the silence.
"I'll try," I said finally. Not a promise. Just the most honest thing I could offer.
The eyes held mine for one more moment.
Then the wings opened fully.
The light that came was blinding not white, but gold, deep and total, filling the dark space until there was nothing else and I felt it move through me like a current, not violent, just complete, like something that had been misaligned finally settling into place.
My heartbeat synced with something.
Then the workshop snapped back.
---
I was kneeling on the floor.
I didn't remember going down. My hand was wrapped around Drago, knuckles pale, the metal warm against my palm warmer than the room explained, warmer than metal had any reason to be.
I stayed there for a moment, just breathing.
Ren was in the doorway.
I hadn't heard him come back. He was looking at me with that careful expression not alarmed, just watchful, the way he watched things in the workshop when he wasn't sure yet what he was seeing.
"Ryo."
"I'm okay," I said.
He didn't move. "What happened?"
I looked down at Drago. The gold edge caught the morning light, and for just a second the red in the core seemed deeper than usual.
"I'm not sure," I said. "But I think" I stopped. Started again. "I think I understand something now that I didn't before."
Ren was quiet for a moment. Then he walked to his bench and set down the bag from town, moving like he was giving me space without making it obvious.
"Good," he said. "That usually takes longer."
I stood up slowly and set Drago on the table.
He sat there in the morning light the same Bey he'd always been, same layer, same disc, same driver. Nothing about him had changed.
But I'd been somewhere with him now. I'd heard his voice, or whatever the version of his voice was that lived in that dark space between a pull and a launch. I'd looked him in the eye.
It wasn't nothing.
I picked up the launcher.
"Three. Two. One."
The ripcord snapped.
Drago entered the bowl clean, found the line, and held it smooth and steady and completely alive.
I watched him spin and didn't write anything in the notebook.
That night, before I slept, I looked at him on the windowsill.
For the first time since I'd woken up in this world, the distance felt smaller.
Not gone. Not fixed.
Just smaller.
And for now, that was enough.